Modern organizations store electronic information associated with one or more entities, such as people, organizations, or the like. For example, different systems within an enterprise may store data representing personal contact information, management structures, electronic mail communications, project assignments, etc. This data may also suggest different types of relationships (e.g., manager-managee, same project, same location, etc.) between people within the enterprise.
Commonly-assigned co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/253,562 describes systems to populate a social network based on disparate enterprise source data in order to expose various relationships between entities. Commonly-assigned co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/253,518 describes a system to search for entities within such a social network.
Conventional systems operate based on the most-recently available data. That is, stored data related to entities is simply overwritten when new information becomes available. The determination of entity relationships proceeds based on this most-recent data. Accordingly, searching for entities and/or relationships generates search results which reflect the present point in time.
Systems are desired for maintaining past information regarding entities and relationships, while also supporting newly-received information. Such systems may provide searching based on information date, and/or may manage data obsolesence. Desired systems may also facilitate the foregoing functionality in a environment including multiple information providers.